Apoptosis
by labyrinthine
Summary: Sydney, deconstructed.


Title: Apoptosis  
  
Author: labyrinthine  
  
E-mail: elabyrinthine@yahoo.com  
  
Rating/Classification: PG/vignette, pseudo-science lesson  
  
Summary: Sydney, deconstructed.  
  
Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me. The hard science, however, is fairly accurate.  
  
Author Notes: 10:36pm - 12:32am. Never wrote a piece like this before, and won't be offended if you think the piece itself should undergo programmed death. Really. Scientific shout-outs to: Thorne (go white blood cells, go!), Hil (tonight was meant for posting, that's all I'm saying), Server 5 chicks (I have no life because of you guys, you rock), and to all the poor overworked bio majors out there who study too hard and start to feel really sympathetic to poor destined apoptopic cells…  
  
*****  
  
Isolation isn't always a bad thing. You can be forced into it, outcast from the community around you; this is not a desirable outcome. But self- isolation can be therapeutic. A warranted choice. The smart choice.  
  
Sydney thinks she is doing the right thing. She is so often out of town; it is easy to beg out of parties out or nights in crashing with friends, when she has lit papers to write, a thesis to research. This is a slow process - sequestering herself from Will and Francie cold-turkey would raise suspicions, so she has become adept at pacing her absences so they are unaware of any sudden shift. It is not that she dislikes their company; on the contrary, she is becoming aware of in-jokes that she is not a part of, a comfortable rapport between them that she envies. She just needs to be alone, sometimes, more often.  
  
From a distance, she can almost make them out, going about their lives in the periphery of her vision. They are a part of a community, an ordinary and normal existence. The farther she drifts from this norm, the less she misses the bustle and confusion of an integrated life, and she feels more at peace.  
  
She thinks there is less of her, lately. She bought a bathroom scale - she never owned one of her own before, Danny had sat in on too many seminars on body weight and self-image to allow one in her possession - and weighs herself every day, twice that sometimes, just to make sure she isn't really degrading away. Her weight never fluctuates, her clothes don't feel any looser, but she nevertheless feels more compact, condensed. This feeling persists, but after a little while it fades to the back of her mind, and she is no longer concerned by the development.  
  
*****  
  
Her last mission was not a failure, reminds Vaughn. So she wasn't able to make copies of the banking statements she was retrieving for SD-6 - that's pretty difficult to do when you're running for your life from a shadow government militia. He's just happy she made it out in one piece, or so he says.  
  
Sydney disagrees, silently. She messed up. The security guard, the first one, should have been no problem. But he was. She spent too much time trying to overpower him; she wasted valuable time before alarms went off and expended unnecessary energy that left her beyond fatigued on her final sprint to safety. Her fighting was sloppy, predictable - she was better trained, too well prepared, to make such a blunder.  
  
If he notices her lack of outward emotion over the situation, he makes no sign of it.  
  
Switching gears, they begin planning her next counter, another mission she leaves for in the morning. Rather, Vaughn plans out the mission while she struggles to focus on the intricate details. She has always been confident of her abilities - they have never failed her, she has never felt impossibly outmatched or without a last route of escape.  
  
But she feels afraid, just the tiniest bit, that maybe she isn't up to this challenge. Little mistakes could cascade to major incidents, a slippery slope of destruction. She is losing structural integrity, her crumbling inside is starting to peek through and affect her outward actions. She thinks it is only a matter of time before this becomes obvious to others beside herself. It is a good thing, she reasons, that other people are becoming more distant, less focused. Perhaps she appears the same to them, and she will be safe a little while longer.  
  
*****  
  
Her lit professor does a double-take every time she walks into class. She hopes this is just because of her sporadic attendance and not for any personal discrepancy that is obvious to everybody but herself. She does what is expected of her, taking notes, looking interested to a lecture she can't quite follow no matter how hard she seems to concentrate.  
  
After class her professor approaches her, asking how her last trip was, if she managed to do any sight-seeing. Sydney is unprepared for the question, and draws a blank to her whereabouts the past few days. She is still in school mode; the cross-topic question expecting her to reference her last mission is too broad for her to access. She replies in the negative and quickly gathers her belongings, leaving the room, walking out of the building to the expansive quad outside.  
  
She has recently become aware of these fragments, how truly disjointed her life has become. Her coursework is supposed to be just that, a separate part of her identity that has little bearing or influence on the rest of her life. Her friends at home are not supposed to overlap with her undercover work. She has been avoiding her father lately - he encompasses too many areas of her life, and only seems to serve as a catalyst to further differentiate what is left of her life into tiny, distinct compartments. The splitting itself does not bother her, but she thinks that this is not the norm compared to others around her, and that she will be discovered, and her fragments will split wide open and there will be nothing left.  
  
*****  
  
She realizes one morning that she has no inclination to get out of bed. Her body could perform the task, she assumes, but she has no energy to perform the simple task. Holding herself together is strenuous, a consuming responsibility.  
  
This is normal, she thinks to herself. There is nothing unusual about this process. Predestined, predetermined, an uncontrollable set outcome. I never had a chance.  
  
*****  
  
Elabyrinthine@yahoo.com  
  
"Apoptosis is a highly ordered process in which cells are systematically dissembled. The cells detach from their neighbors and the cytoplasm and nucleus condense. Mitochondria lose their membrane potential and leak cytochrome c into the cytoplasm. As the chromatin condenses, it is cleaved into regular-sized fragments by endonucleases. Finally the cell membrane starts to form blebs and the cell may fragment into condensed apoptotic bodies. Dead cells attract mononuclear phagocytes and are rapidly taken up by phagocytosis to be broken down in phagolysomes. Apoptosis is a feature of normal physiology." 


End file.
